Here’s a quick and dirty breakdown of latitude and longitude: what it is, how it works, and its relation to the global positioning system (GPS) you use in your car, fleet, cell phone, or mobile tablet.

What it Is

Latitudes and longitudes are primarily denoted in degrees. However, when less than one degree, the increments may be expressed as minutes, seconds, or as a decimal. Overall, the coordinates are based on an imaginary grid of the earth, using the premise that the earth is a circle comprised of 360 degrees. Degrees can be further broken down into minutes in seconds, but these units represent measurements not time. Both lines of latitude and longitude run parallel to one another. Most commonly, anything south of the equator is depicted with negative latitude and anything west of the prime meridian is expressed as negative longitude.

Read the rest of this entry »

This gets us mad.  You see portable GPS trackers advertised all over the internet many of them, are motion activated, meaning they turn on when moving and off when stopped.   Do a search, you’ll see companies advertising their GPS tracking products with headlines that read “75 day battery pack, 50 day battery pack, etc”.

We always wondered how a company can advertise how many days a devices battery will last, when the device turns on and off – based on movement?  Do you think that is a bit misleading?

At LiveViewGPS, Inc. – our portable GPS motion activated trackers are rated based on “motion hours”.  Meaning the battery will last approximately X hours in while motion.  For example, a device with a sixty hour motion activated battery will work for 60 hours of actual vehicle drive time.  By the way, we’ve thoroughly tested  each of the batteries we sell to arrive at a hour rating for each battery.  Why?  Because, we don’t want to mislead or misinform our customers, or potential customers.  In fact, we always would rather side with under-promising a devices capability while over-delivering on our products performance.

It’s impossible to say that a battery with a motion activated device is rated for a set number of days – Caveat Emptor.

This was a headline I saw in today’s Fox News, “Husband of missing Missouri Mother of Not ‘Forthcoming’ with information, police say.” You can read the full news article here.  The mother of triplets, was in the early stages of divorce proceedings with her husband.  In fact, she was last seen by her husband, who claims, that she was angry and just walked away.

The fate of this woman is not known at this time, but the situation is looking grim.  Her car was found along a highway abandoned and some personal effects were also found miles away.

If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, here is how using a GPS tracking system on your own vehicle can help protect you.

First and foremost, a GPS vehicle tracking system will allow your family to locate your vehicle instantly should it go missing.

A hardwired gps tracking device is installed covertly in a vehicle, so you’ll be the only one who knows its their. GPS tracking devices, like our RTV5 can be configured with a panic button. Installing and configuring the panic button will send an SMS alert to people you want notified in case you are in trouble.

Setting Boundary Alerts. Setting areas on a map, will allow you to notify friends, family, or a loved one, should your vehicle exit or enter an area that you specify is off limits.

Historical playback. Our gps tracking systems allows you to view the history of a vehicle for up to 90 days back. If someone ever needed to see where your vehicle was, the information is readily available.

What’s the difference between a GSM GPRS tracker and a CDMA tracker?

A GSM GPRS tracker is perhaps the most popular type of GPS data tracker available today. A GSM sim card is inserted into the GPS tracker which allows the device to transmit wireless data through a network (like ATT and T-Mobile) to a wireless access point or APN. The APN connects to the internet and transmits the data to a GPS service provider’s server, where tracking data is made available to the end user. Older sytle GPS trackers will only use SMS messages to send data over the network – this method of sending data is not only expensive, but can be unreliable. Newer GPS trackers, are able to use TCP/IP and UDP internet protocols to transmit data, which are much more efficient than SMS messages.

CDMA trackers, are a little different than a GPRS GSM tracker. Most CDMA gps trackers are equipped with the gpsOne Qualcomm chipset. When compared to GSM trackers, the gpsOne chipset does not appear to be as accurate as its counterpart. However, the gpsOne chipset is able to locate using Assisted GPS.

A-GPS equipped GPS trackers, in a nutshell can use fragmented GPS data along with data gps data stored on a network server, to better return position data. In some cases, typical GPS devices blocked by metal, with no clear view to the sky cannot return accurate location fixes. Whereas, a CDMA device with gpsOne, even though enclosed in metal, the CDMA device will be able to return a position fix.

CDMA devices typically are a little more expensive to use as a GPS tracker. Billing is done on a per locate or “ping” basis, which can add up if you need to perform a lot of locates on your gps tracker.  Please contact us with any questions about GPS Tracking, our normal business hours are M-F from 7 am – 5 pm PST.

Suspecting infidelity, a New Jersey woman, hired a private investigator to follow her husband.  The investigator tried, but could not follow the elusive husband.  So they put a GPS tracking device on the husband’s car, which is pretty tough to outrun.  Needless to say, within a very short period of time, the GPS showed the husband’s car sitting in the driveway of a woman who was not his wife.

The husband sued his wife and the private investigator.  The appellate court judge however ruled in favor of the wife and private investigator.

Appellate Judge Joseph Lisa, Jack Sabatino and Carmen Alvarez said Villanova (the husband) had no right to expect privacy because the GPS tracked his movements on public streets.

“There is no direct evidence in this record to establish that during the approximately 40 days the GPS was in the … glove compartment the device captured a movement of plaintiff into a secluded location that was not in public view, and, if so, that such information was passed along by Mrs. Villanova to (Leonard), Lisa wrote.”